THE UNIVERSAL AND ABSOLUTE RELIGION 377 



a needed lesson to all such as have forgotten that God has the 

 most intimate relation to all business, and especially to the denial 

 of personal responsibility for iniquitous corporate acts. 



In the Rig-Veda of the Hindus are found evidences of the 

 sovereignty and omnipresence of the deity, and the ancient docu- 

 ment records many a cry after immortality. Brahmanism with 

 all its grossness is essentially a spiritual religion. It seeks to fit 

 the spirit by endless transmigrations for a future life. Buddhism 

 represents a half-truth, viz., that the soul to find its true blessed- 

 ness must lose its life. Its fundamental defect is that, unlike Chris- 

 tianity, it does not show how, through losing its lower life, it may 

 find itself in the higher life which Christ makes possible. Confu- 

 cianism deals nobly with the manward duties embraced in the 

 second table of the Mosaic law. It teaches the reform of personal 

 life, some sort of regulation of the family, and the correction of 

 certain social and political abuses. Of course, it is agnostic as to 

 God, and yet in the very effort to escape God it substitutes nature 

 and ancestor worship. Zoroastrianism entertains a dualism of 

 principles embracing the conflict between good and evil, but all 

 ultimating in the conquest of the good over the evil. 



There are, however, fatal defects in all these systems which 

 render them insufficient to meet the deeper needs of man, while 

 Christianity alone embraces all the good found in all these systems 

 and has none of their evils. 



What I am to present in this paper may be described as "a 

 study preliminary to the justification of Christian missions." For, 

 as Mr. Balfour says of theology, so may it be said of missions, 

 that "the decisive battles are fought beyond its frontiers." It is 

 not over matters purely missionary that the cause of missions is 

 lost or won. The judgments we form upon the special problems 

 of missions are commonly settled for us by our general mode of 

 looking at Christianity itself. So, in our talk about missions, to 

 use a phrase of Emerson, we " say what we ought to say," accord- 

 ing as we are Christian, modo-Christian, or non-Christian. At 

 bottom the problem of Christian missions is only the problem of 

 the extension of Christianity. How aggressively, how rapidly, or 

 in what forms we are to do it, are secondary matters. The human 

 methods whereby Christianity is extended, always with more or 

 less imperfectness, are the methods of missions. My object now 

 is to point out in Christianity those characteristics which con- 

 stitutionally and reasonably commend it to universal trial, and, 

 therefore, to universal and aggressive propagation. By Chris- 

 tianity I mean, of course, Christianity as it is in itself, as it came 

 uncorrapted from the hand of its author; Christianity as separated 

 from all those perversions and exaggerations which have become 



